Brad Feld, the Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur and early stage investor, is well known for helping to jumpstart new tech and entrepreneurial ecosystems in areas outside of the well-trodden Silicon Valley region.
The most recent place on which he’s set his sights? Kansas City.
The Kansas City metropolitan area (which spans both the states of Kansas and Missouri) is of course home to the first implementation of the Google Fiber Internet service provider project, which purportedly brings TV and Internet service that’s 100 times faster than what Americans typically have today thanks to a 1-gigabit fiber optic cable installation. Google began rolling out Fiber in Kansas City late last year. This obviously gives Kansas City a big boost in its potential to be the home for new startups.
To help kickstart the Kansas City entrepreneurial scene, Feld announced in a blog post today that he just closed on a new three-bedroom home in the first Google “Fiberhood,” Kansas City, Kansas’ Hanover Heights neighborhood. But he doesn’t plan to use it himself. Instead, he will open the space — which is being called the “Feld KC Fiberhouse” — to up to five startup founders to live and work in the house rent-free for one year.
Applications to live in the Feld KC Fiberhouse are open from today until March 22nd, 2013. Up to five winners will be chosen based on the “innovative potential of their startups” by a panel of five judges — Feld, Scott Case of Startup America Partnership, David Cohen of TechStars, and Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation — who will finish their evaluation period on April 5th. Applicants must be 18 or over to be considered.
This will be the second startup-focused home in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood. This past October, British ex-pat and startup enthusiast Ben Barreth bought a home there to house startup founders as part of his new “Homes for Hackers” initiative. In his blog post today, Feld said that his KC home purchase was inspired by a conversation with Barreth.
It’ll be really interesting to see who Feld and company select to join the KC Startup House, and what they end up building there (talk about a great potential TechCrunch Cribs visit!) To learn more about the Feld KC Startup House Competition, you can go here and apply here.